The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865

Preface

Preface In trying to understand the origins of African American literature, I have taken what many may find to be an unusual approach. For one thing, this study is something other than a survey of major African American authors and their works, although, of course, they occupy center stage. Rather, it is an effort to investigate the historical conditions for an African American literary enterprise. It is an effort to understand why and how black women and men came to do the literary work they did, as well as why, during its more than a century of early development, such work took the various shapes it did. This study is also unusual in that its focus reaches well beyond the careers of African American writers and their works. It locates the origins of African American literature in a historical context that includes, among other things, African and American oral traditions, European conventions , American race relations, and political activism. Examining a broad array of works by white as well as black authors, I found the origins of African American literature to be in a process in which black and white writers collaborated in the creation of what I call an “African American literary presence.” This involved developing a voice and a persona imbued with authority and standing, taking a place in larger realms of discourse in American society. Such a presence began to evolve even before there were African American writers, and it played a major role in American cultural history from colonial times to emancipation and beyond. At the center of this process was the question of authority. We are accustomed to thinking of the African American voice as historically an excluded voice, a silenced voice. In the period surveyed here this was not the case. By no later than 1680, as a wealth of evidence indicates, some ix Bruce REV.PAGE 00 (i-xviii) 9/26/01 7:12 AM Page ix English and American audiences—black and white—had come to vest a “black” voice with a special authority that was the product of its very blackness. The modes of authority would change, of course, as would the significance of an African American voice in the larger American context. But the authoritative presence would remain a significant part of literary and cultural life. Most important to understanding the nature of that authoritative voice, I suggest here, is an examination of the kinds of communities in which it could be asserted, what I sometimes refer to as “discursive worlds.” This has meant, above all, an approach to literary activity focusing less on texts than on the webs of interaction among African Americans and between black and white Americans that encouraged literary endeavor and provided for the discursive realms within which it took place. As we shall see, such interactions and the exchanges they entailed were present from an early time. In chapter 1, for example, I show how traditions for an African American voice were shaped during the colonial era by English literary conventions, African and African American oral traditions, religious developments involving blacks and whites alike, and ambiguities in race relations, all interacting to create new literary forms and possibilities. And as we shall also see, the notion of “interaction” is crucial. As the evidence indicates, Africans, African Americans, British writers, and Anglo-American activists really did collaborate, sometimes quite intentionally, to create a credible black voice and to assert the authoritative possibilities for that voice in contexts far more diverse than one might expect. A similar approach governs subsequent chapters. Chapter 2, in some ways a linchpin for this study, documents the significance of African American voices to both the Revolutionary cause and the early years of American nation-building. It was during this era that a distinctive African American literary persona began to emerge—apparent initially, and most influentially, in the career of Phillis Wheatley—embodying tendencies in African American voice and authority that had only begun to take shape in earlier times, establishing patterns that would remain important for almost another hundred years. It was also during this era, in the works of both black and white writers, that a distinctively African American Preface x Bruce REV.PAGE 00 (i-xviii) 9/26/01 7:12 AM Page x critique of the larger society began to enter into the realm of public discourse. Both these themes—the development of an authoritative black persona...